When I get to the step to run sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight to enable Silverlight, I then start up Firefox (it had not been running prior to this step). When I then look at the about:plugins, I find this:

So, I shutdown Firefox, ran sudo pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins , restarted Firefox, but still had the same problem.

So, at your diagnostics page I found all you see below, but I don't know how to interpret it. I realize there are failure messages in the output below, but I don't know what is wrong, nor what needs to be done. My question is, Will you please help me know what I should be doing to get this to work? Thanks. Here's the output from your diagnostics page (The plugin I selected was Silverlight 5.1):

Configuration of Pipelight
Checking if config exists ...okay
/usr/share/pipelight/configs/pipelight-silverlight5.1
Checking if pluginLoaderPath is set and exists ...okay
/usr/share/pipelight/pluginloader.exe
Checking if winePath is set and exists ...okay
/usr/share/pipelight/wine
Checking if winePrefix is set and exists ...okay
/home/main1/.wine-pipelight
Checking if dllPath/dllname is set and exists ...failed
You need to define either a valid dllPath/dllName or regKey
Unable to verify if the DLL exists, please check this manually!
(dllPath = c:\Program Files\Silverlight\latest\)
(dllName = npctrl.dll)
Checking if dependencyInstaller is set and exists ...okay
/usr/share/pipelight/install-dependency
Checking if dependencies are defined ...okay

Distribution
Loading file /etc/issue ...failed

Content of file: /usr/share/pipelight/configs/pipelight-silverlight5.1
Loading file /usr/share/pipelight/configs/pipelight-silverlight5.1 ...okay
#
# Enables a diagnostic mode which might be helpful to find an
# error in the configuration or installation.
# To get the error messages go to: http://fds-team.de/pipelight
#
# Information for advanced users: The diagnostic page embeds the plugin
# of type "application/x-pipelight-error" to trigger the output of some
# debug information. The plugin cannot be triggered if everything is
# working, so this only affects users with a broken installation.
# The debug output will include paths on the local filesystem and the
# linux distribution used. If you don't want to leak this information
# accidentially in case of a broken installation please either uninstall
# Pipelight or disable the diagnosticMode. [default: false]
#
diagnosticMode = true

#
# Path to the wine directory or the wine executable. When you
# specify a directory it should contain /bin/wine.
#
winePath = $share/wine

#
# Path to the plugin loader executable
# (Should be set correctly by the make script)
#
pluginLoaderPath = $share/pluginloader.exe

#
# Path to the runtime DLLs (libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll, libspp-0.dll,
# libstdc++-6.dll). Only necessary when these DLLs are not in the same
# directory as the pluginloader executable.
#
gccRuntimeDlls =

#
# Path and name to the Silverlight directory
# You should prefer using regKey to make it easier to switch between
# different versions.
#
dllPath = c:\Program Files\Silverlight\latest\
dllName = npctrl.dll

#
# Name of the registry key at HKCU\Software\MozillaPlugins\ or
# HKLM\Software\MozillaPlugins\ where to search for the plugin path.
#
# You should use this option instead of dllPath/dllName in most cases
# since you do not need to alter dllPath on a program update.
#
# regKey = @Microsoft.com/NpCtrl,version=1.0

#
# fakeVersion allows to fake the version string of Silverlight
# Allows to get around some version checks done by some websites
# when using an old version of Silverlight.
#
# fakeVersion = 5.1.30214.0

#
# overwriteArg allows to overwrite/add initialization arguments
# passed by websites to Silverlight applications. You can
# use this option as often as you want to overwrite multiple
# parameters. The GPU acceleration state of Silverlight can be controlled
# by setting:
#
# enableGPUAcceleration=false # disable GPU acceleration
# comment out # let the application decide (default)
# enableGPUAcceleration=true # force GPU acceleration
#
# You may need to overwrite the minimum runtime version if
# you use an old Silverlight version as some websites set
# an artificial limit for the version number although it
# would work with older versions.
#
# overwriteArg = minRuntimeVersion=5.0.61118.0
# overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=false
# overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=true
#

#
# windowlessmode refers to a term of the Netscape Plugin API and
# defines a different mode of drawing and handling events.
# On some desktop enviroments you may have problems using the
# keyboard in windowless mode, on the other hand the drawing is
# more efficient when this mode is enabled. Just choose what works
# best for you. [default: false]
#
windowlessMode = false

#
# Some browsers that don't support XEmbed only work with "real"
# windowlessmode. The following option can be used to force this
# mode. [default: false]
#
linuxWindowlessMode = false

#
# In order to support browsers without NPAPI timer support
# (like Midori) we've implemented a fallback to
# NPN_PluginThreadAsyncCall. In the default configuration
# a timer based approach is preferred over async calls and the
# plugin decides by itself which method to use depending on the
# browser capabilities. Setting the following option to true
# forces the plugin to use async calls. This might be mainly
# useful for testing the difference between both event handling
# approaches. [default: false]
#
# eventAsyncCall = true

#
# The opera browser claims to provide timer functions, but they
# don't seem to work properly. When the opera detection is
# enabled Pipelight will switch to eventAsyncCall automatically
# based on the user agent string. [default: true]
#
operaDetection = true

#
# We are currently implementing hardware acceleration support, which
# can cause problems on some systems as especially specific open source
# drivers render only garbage when hardware acceleration is enabled.
# To prevent breaking any working solutions, we are currently
# implementing a whitelist system, which will enable hardware
# acceleration by default if the specified shell scripts returns 0.
# Otherwise we will disable it. You can still use
#
# overwriteArg = enableGPUAcceleration=false/true
#
# to overwrite the check results. If you really want to skip this test
# you can use: silverlightGraphicDriverCheck = /bin/true
#
silverlightGraphicDriverCheck = true

#------------------------- EXPERIMENTAL -------------------------
# Watch out: The following section contains highly experimental
# stuff! These functions are likely not working properly yet and
# might be removed at any time.

#
# In order to make it possible to let a window stay opened in fullscreen, even
# if the user clicks somewhere else it is necessary to install a window class
# hook. With some plugins this could lead to other problems! [default: false]
experimental-windowClassHook = true

#
# A sandbox is a method to isolate an untrusted program from the rest of
# the system to prevent damage in case of a virus, program errors or
# similar issues. We've been developing the ability to use a (self-created)
# sandbox, but this feature still has to be considered experimental.
# The feature will only be used when the sandbox path exists.
#
sandboxPath = $share/sandbox

Related bugs

Related FAQ:

sorry for the delayed response, I didn't have time to write an answer to your question initially when you posted it, and then forgot it later on. Thanks for pinging me that this problem is still present.

I took a closer look, and the output seems to be very weird, and normally shouldn't be possible:

* /etc/issue is not present? Its not a critical issue, but should be present even on all _old_ Ubuntu distributions
* dllPath/dllName is present in the config file, and looks valid ? nevertheless pipelight still complains?

This might have different reasons, either your setup is just a bit customized with respect to some settings, or something is broken. Unfortunately this diagnostic page doesn't provide enough information about what exactly is wrong. To make it easier to track this down please create a log of the terminal output as described here:

the output is okay and exactly what I wanted (no additional WINEDEBUG flags required). Unfortunately it still looks very weird and doesn't make much sense. :/
Please also attach the output of the following 4 commands:

ii wine-compholio 1.7.22~ubuntu14.04.1 amd64 The Compholio Edition is a special build of the popular Wine software
ii wine-compholio-amd64 1.7.22~ubuntu14.04.1 amd64 The Compholio Edition is a special build of the popular Wine software
ii wine-compholio-i386 1.7.22~ubuntu14.04.1 i386 The Compholio Edition is a special build of the popular Wine software

Besides that - do you use any additional custom settings, for example a special sandbox to run your browser (which wasn't there by default)? Was this really a direct installation of Ubuntu 14.04, or did you upgrade over time (which would explain why for example /etc/issue is missing, if it maybe wasn't present yet in very old versions)?

Moreover, based on the initial diagnostic output of the first post, you'll also have to install a user agent switcher for Firefox - this step is necessary since Netflix (and many other services) refuse to work, as soon as they notice you're on Linux.

Thank you, I was able to successfully view a movie at the Netflix site. Thanks for your help!

However, when I ran the diagnostic, I got these two errors, even though I did have the user agent installed and running, and for the Netflix site (which worked) and for the diagnostic page I was using this user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0, here are the errors I still get, should I be worried about them?

there is no need to worry as long as everything works as expected on Netflix.

Nevertheless, when you also want to use Pipelight on other streaming pages, it might probably be necessary to fix the user agent problem.

The output from the diagnostic page looks like you're either using a different user agent switcher (I suspect user agent switcher 0.7.3?!) than the one in my instructions above (user agent overrider). Not every user agent switcher changes the user agent everywhere, thats why the diagnostic page is still able to see that you're on Linux.

Many thanks for the detailed discussion here! I had the same issue and was researching the FAQs to see what solutions there were to similar problems. This solution worked for me (and did not require any modification of the ~/.wine-pipelight/ path initially installed (i.e., you don't need to remove it).

NOTE to others searching this issue: the apparmor issue is good to check if Pipelight doesn't work if there were no issues upon install and the same debug messages arose upon the test (see the first message from DNoga).